"Ken Burns Effect" demonstration

I created this little video for Wikipedia to demonstrate the "Ken Burns Effect", a rather famous documentary film technique that's used pretty much everywhere. And what would be the better way to demonstrate it than (very badly) recreating "The Civil War" at 1 o'clock in the morning with a piece of animation software I've hardly even used and a few random pictures pulled from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons? Yep... Well, here it is! Hope no one minds much.

Created in Synfig Studio ( http://www.synfig.org/ )

• Category

  Education

[Strideo1]

Where is the mournful violin music and the old historians talking about the war?

[cosycleaner]

Ken Morse - very famous 'Rostrum Cameraman' was using this technique for the BBC 40plus years ago...also see the BBC's legendary 'Great War' series of 1964 for more of the same. Ken Burns is an excellent film maker but don't credit him America with things he didn't invent!

[Molly Orman]

He doesn't claim to. In fact he credits learning it to the man who taught him. It's just come to be called the Ken Burns effect because he's used it so widely in such well known films.

[DaErkka]

That is one, more advanced form of it yes. This here is the very basic form of the Ken Burns effect, used to add "motion" into a photograph or a picture.

[93cian]

Well it includes panning as well (basically sliding the picture into place). But yeah, someone had to come up with it. There was clearly a time when people did not do this.

[PageboyHaircut]

I've always hated the fucking zooming into photographs. The last thing I want to see is an up close of someones ugly face, wrinkles, or some other annoying deformity.

[Chuck Norris]

what the fuck its just zooming in ? am i missing something ?

[hells kitchennyc]

This is NOT the Ken Burns effect. The foreground, middle ground, and background all move, pan, push, pull at different rates. All you did was pan and move picture around.

[robbyperez]

Isn't the Ken Burns effect... making documentaries???

[kozmon0t]

:51-end The smoke and mist cleared and revealed the fallen of both sides littering the field. Some lay on their backs, contorted in a wretched display of their final agonies, and staring skyward as if they sought mercy from the heavens, and found none. Major Ezekiel Butterfield.

Burns documentaries are always a series of melodramatic quotes interspersed with occasional narration. They are acclaimed garbage. Drama is not documentary.

[kozmon0t]

:06-:16 Loath as I was to take up arms against fellow Americans, I could not but do my sacred duty for my beloved Virginia. Robert E. Lee.

:17-:26 I arrived at Manassas to find our army in disarray and our men fleeing. I said to them, what the hell's wrong with you - kill some damn Yankees! Brigadier Gen. Joseph Johnston

:27-:50 We thought the Yankees might be fooled if half our men wore blue, but they fired canisters and took a wretched toll. A melancholy, hopeless charge. Private L. Jones.

[Ypsiroselee]

I don't Ken Burns would claim the Ken Burns Effect, either.  If you have the DVDs with "The making of the Civil War" on them, he's most pleased with the quality of the ensemble cast, and especially with having Shelby Foote appear throughout.